Is it bad practice to make attributes public so other classes can call their methods?

[enerj]

This is for a game I need to code, an Oregon Trail style game, but I've always been curious about this.

For example, my main method has the Wagon object, and the wagon is holding the different people. If I want to modify a Persons health with setHealth(int h), could I just make the people a public attribute (or array) and the main method could directly modify them?

This seems a lot easier, and I won't have to put a new setter in Wagon just to modify its contents.

thanks for the help guys

[kraigballa]

Good question! I am wondering the same thing.

[Fubarable]

It's usually a good practice to use getters and setters. This allows you to fully control visibility of your properties and allows you to do validity checking prior to setting a property. It also gives other flexibility such as allowing you to later make your property a "bound" property by using PropertyChangeSupport so that other classes (or this class) can listen and react to changes in this property -- something that I've found to be very useful.

[doWhile]

Controlling Access to Members of a Class (The Java™ Tutorials > Learning the Java Language > Classes and Objects)
To quote the advice from the article above:

Use the most restrictive access level that makes sense for a particular member. Use private unless you have a good reason not to.

In other words - it is good practice to encapsulate variables - making variables public can cause all sorts of problems when it comes to a good deal of things, especially code maintenance.

[kraigballa]

Thank you all